The 150th edition of the cricket almanack appears on Thursday – a constant in
a changing world.

The humorist and cricket lover Marcus Berkmann once wrote about the experience of being sent a Wisden Almanack to review, two weeks before publication date.

He rashly took it on the London Underground, only to realise that the middle-aged man sitting opposite was seriously considering a mugging.

This year’s version will appear in bookshops on Thursday. As the 150th edition, it will be even more eagerly sought after.

Who could have imagined such an innings when John Wisden launched the original Almanack in 1864 – a strange beast that offered not only a selection of cricket scorecards but a chart of lunar cycles, a summary of the rules of bowls, and a list of past winners of the Derby?

The following year found Wisden settling down into a more recognisable pattern, and it has never missed a season since – a yellow brick road that stretches, unbroken, through 16 different editors.

In the words of Bill Furmedge – who makes a living as the world’s only full-time Wisden dealer – every edition has something different to say about its era.

When you pick one up, he told the BBC this week: “It is like stepping into a Tardis and being transported back in time”.

How do we explain the fascination of the Almanack? You have to imagine that the majority of pages – occupied as they are by events at Bristol or Chelmsford on any given Thursday – go largely unread by its 40,000 annual purchasers.

Admittedly, there are more essays nowadays to leaven the weight of statistics. But, as with Playboy, few people buy Wisden for the articles.

Wisden speaks to a very male instinct for completeness, a variation on the list-mania satirised by Nick Hornby in his book High Fidelity.

Admittedly, there is scant chance of anyone really needing to know what happened when Nottinghamshire played Lancashire at Aigburth – and free digital archives such as CricInfo and CricketArchive are now available in any case.

But it is somehow comforting to know the scorecard is there, taking its orderly place on the bookshelf.

“There is something medieval about the enterprise,” writes Robert Winder in a forthcoming history of Wisden, entitled The Little Wonder, that will also be published next week. In his introduction, he suggests that “one imagines a scaffold teeming with labourers: it feels finely chiselled by a thousand hands”.

In the late 1990s, I was fortunate enough to make a couple of incisions myself, as part of a four-man proofreading team. Or rather a four-person team, since the sharpest pair of eyes belonged to deputy editor Harriet Monkhouse.

Although generally way off the pace, I did have one small moment of glory, when I spotted that the little asterisks denoting left-handers had fallen off the university batting averages. That way, madness lies.

Without accuracy, Wisden would be nothing. Since the 1930s, its unofficial subtitle has been “the bible of cricket” (a phrase coined by Alec Waugh, brother of Evelyn, in a review for the London Mercury).

Its latest editor, Lawrence Booth, goes even further, describing it as “the conscience of the game”.

Out of its fastidious attention to detail grows its authority – because you have to admire a book that chronicles every leg-bye with such faithfulness.

From their primrose pulpit, editors of the past have inveighed against everything from the scourge of throwing to the evils of Bodyline.

The Almanack’s most famous line still belongs to the great Sydney Pardon, who thundered that England’s selection policy for the 1909 Ashes series had “touched the confines of lunacy”.

Rather more recently, Matthew Engel created the first rankings system when he launched the Wisden World Championship in 1997.

Part of the establishment, yet prepared to challenge the establishment, Wisden has earned the respect and affection of every serious sports fan.

In its 150th year, that iconic yellow jacket still marks a fixed point in a disorderly world.